Cuba: Insanity, stupidity, and refusing to learn

The opposition to normalizing relations with Cuba reminds me that many people don’t know crazy from stupid. Here’s crazy:

“I used to think I was Jesus.”

Sitting in a cafe in Bisbee, Arizona, I once overheard a solitary man announce this, out of the blue, to a man sitting at a nearby table. Notice he said, “used to.” After being thrown in jail, he found out the truth. He figured a god could walk through walls if he wanted, so he tried to escape the Jesus way. In this he failed.

But this insanely delusional man didn’t repeat the same action, expecting a different result. Because that’s just stupid.

So, when critics argue that the United States should continue the same policies against Cuba that have failed for fifty years, they’re not crazy. When they say that these policies will protect Latin America from Cuban influence, even though these countries have long had normalized relations with Cuba and opposed the U.S. embargo, they’re not crazy.

Refusing to learn from such obvious failure is not a mark of insanity: it’s just dumb.